The Future is Fantastic (If You Want It)

Fantastic Futures is a collaborative team of students, artists, doctors, and future leaders from Iraq and the United States. For their recently completed Rhizome Commission, Fantastic Futures created a free and open online sound archive that examines concepts of time through the recording, collaging, and sharing of sounds between these two countries. For these young people, faced with huge questions about their future, the website serves as a platform to subvert unjust structures of power used to divide them by instead supporting each other and offering a means through which their stories might be heard. Their goal is nothing short of social justice and the means of achieving that are slow, steady, and subversively poetic.

For this event, which takes place in the New Museum Theater, Fantastic Futures will create a participatory performance of the website, enacted by humans wearing sounds. To further explore shared experiences of time, memory, and trauma between countries in conflict, audience members will be blindfolded for a portion of the event to enhance a synesthetic experience—listening to light. By slowing down, and possibly stopping time altogether, Fantastic Futures’s performance creates a space for careful listening and contemplation.

Sponsors

Organized by Rhizome, the Rhizome: New Silent series receives major support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Additional support is provided by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts.

Education and public programs are made possible by a generous grant from Goldman Sachs Gives at the recommendation of David and Hermine Heller.